The Orgasm Gap
A new gender inequality for the new millennium – and two others.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Ihave often written that there is no more glass ceiling and no more salary gap. OK. So if the gender gaps are these feminist favorites, then are there gender gaps we should be concentrating on? Yes:
1. The startup gap. Women need to be compensated at a higher rate than men if they are to give up their personal lives in order to work. Law firms accomplish this by keeping women on partner track even when they’re part-time. Corporations do this by offering flex time and other business-bending options for high-performing women who want to take care of kids.
VCs talk endlessly about why there are so few women running venture backed companies, but it’s incredulous talk. The reason is that VCs don’t pay women more. Here’s the bottom line: If you take a man and a woman doing the same office job and the same parenting job, the man will think he’s doing a good job parenting, but not the woman.
This makes genetic sense. The men had to think the kids were fine when they left the cave to hunt. Or else no one would have eaten. The women had to think the kids always needed more attention. Otherwise, the women would say, “That’s enough” and the kids would starve or get eaten by lions.
You need to spend TONS of time away from kids doing a startup. For women to do that, they need to be compensated more than men.
2. The orgasm gap. People who have orgasms do better: They earn more, they hang out with higher powered people, they are better at public speaking, and they walk with a more confident gait, which inspires confidence.
So we need to pay attention to what Hannah Seligson reports in the Daily Beast: “Women are shattering political glass ceilings, surpassing men in the workforce, and winning Indy-car races. But there’s one area where the gap has proved stubborn: The orgasm gap.”
Paula England, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, says, “The orgasm gap is an inequity that’s as serious as the pay gap, and it’s producing a rampant culture of sexual asymmetry.”
Where does this orgasm gap come from? Probably the amount of effort expended in bed – and who’s expending it. England’s study found that women give oral sex to their male partners in all contexts – from casual hookups to serious relationships – at significantly higher rates than men do.
And if you’re wondering how this pans out across generations, things seem to get worse in the younger crowd – Caitlin Flanagan reports in the Atlantic that girls are giving blow jobs just to get the boys to shut up.
3. The fun gap. As soon as men and women start aging, the men are happier. Maybe they have had more training on how to have fun. But life is too difficult for any of us to wait to have fun. We should all start learning early on.
You can see the gap at the bar. Alcohol makes us have a more broad imagination and do a wider range of things. So why is it more acceptable for professional men than professional women to go out with friends and get drunk? Why is it OK for men to get drunk in order to hook up, but not for women? New York magazine calls the gap the the last frontier of feminism.
It’s clear that women are spending more time following the rules than men, and people who have more fun actually do better in life: their fun snowballs, and the more we enjoy, the more we get out of what we enjoy.
It starts early, where the girls pay attention. The boys, having spent their years of their lives turning everything into a gun/sword, can’t be contained.
Yes, these are generalizations, but as the mom of two boys, I have never heard any parent disagree. The problem is that the boys are having all the fun. Women are doing better than men in school but school isn’t what makes kids successful at work. What prepares you for life is athletics, aiming high, breaking rules, playing video games. Girls should do those things more. Then, as they grow up, they should spend their time figuring out how to get more orgasms.




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